The present invention relates to an apparatus for applying a treating solution such as a dye solution to a cloth as foam continuously for the subsequent heat treatment of the resulting cloth.
Processing a textile product such as a cloth may roughly be classified into a pretreatment including scouring and bleaching, dyeing and finishing. In such processing operations, a treating solution containing a corresponding treating agent, such as caustic alkali and a bleaching agent in pretreatment, a dye in dyeing and a finishing agent in finishing, is applied to the cloth, and the cloth is then subjected to heat treatment. As a means for applying a necessary amount of a treating agent to a cloth in these processings, either a method of using a transfer paper or a method of soaking the cloth with a treating solution has usually been adopted. However, the method of applying a treating agent by using a transfer paper is limited of the use of an expensive agent, and a method of soaking a cloth with a treating solution has been widely adopted.
In applying a treating solution continuously to a long cloth by using the method of soaking a cloth with a treating solution, it needs usually an excess of the treating solution in order to adhere the treating agent to the cloth sufficiently and uniformly, so that the excess of the treating solution and/or solvent must be removed from the resulting cloth prior to the heat treatment. Intermediate drying is done usually for this purpose, but this method consumes a large quantity of heat energy. To diminish the consumption of heat energy, such a process as squeezing the solution and/or solvent has also been done in some instances with the use of a powerful mangle, but there is a limit for the amount of the solution and/or solvent squeezed out thereby and a sufficient amount of the solution and/or solvent can hardly be removed. When the treating solution is not applied in excess, the distribution of the treating agent in the cloth becomes non-uniform, and a satisfactory treatment of the cloth can by no means be attained.